Thallium-201SPECT assessment in the detection of recurrences of treated gliomas and ependymomas

Abstract

Sensitivity and specificity of (201)Tl-SPECT to detect glioma recurrences were 90% and 100% respectively and 93% accuracy. Sensitivity and specificity for high grade tumours, were 100% respectively. Due to 4 false negatives, sensitivity and specificity for low grade gliomas were 78% and 100%. In the positive (201)Tl-SPECT group of patients overall survival was 13.64% at the end of the study. The negative (201)Tl-SPECT group had 84.62% overall survival at the end of the study (p = 0.0003). CONCLUSIONS. (201)Tl-SPECT is a valuable and noninvasive diagnostic procedure to detect recurrence or progression disease for treated gliomas and ependymomas. (201)Tl-SPECT has a good correlation with short term prognosis with excellent diagnostic accuracy.

CT-based quantitative SPECT for the radionuclide 201Tl: experimental validation and a standardized uptake value for brain tumour patients

“…In 2011, Vos et al [ 37 ] reported a strong correlation between survival and the tumour to normal brain ratio. Similar findings have been reported by others [ 33 , 38–40 ] .…”

“…As early as 1991 [ 25 ] thallium uptake was demonstrated to correlate with tumour recurrence. Others have assessed this further by tumour to scalp ratios [ 26 ] , tumour to normal brain ratios [ 14 , 27–31 ] tumour to myocardial uptake [ 32 ] , retention rates on delayed imaging [ 14 , 31 ] and visual inspection [ 33 , 34 ] .…”

Imaging modalities in high-grade gliomas: Pseudoprogression, recurrence, or necrosis?

“…36 201 Thallium ( 201 Tl) provided 100% specificity and variable sensitivity (84-100%) in differentiating RN from recurrence. [36][37][38] The use of 99m technetium ( 99m Tc)-glucoheptonic acid and 123 iodine-( 123 I) alpha-methyl-tyrosine had similar accuracy (93% and 96%) in detecting recurrence. 39 Another tracer, 99m Tchexakis-2-methoxyisobutylisonitrile, is reported to provide better sensitivity (93% and 89%) than specificity (83% and 83%) for identifying recurrence.…”

Performance of SPECT in the differential diagnosis of glioma recurrence from radiation necrosis

“…We also performed several subgroup analyses by radiotracer. The pooled SEN, SPE, LR+, and LRÀ derived from 477 scans with 201 Tl SPECT in 12 studies [10,11,22,24,26,30,32,35,38,[40][41][42] other tracers was impossible because of limited data. There was no significant difference in the AUC of the three groups using different tracers (P interaction > 0.05).…”